Is SAP supposed to be an upgrade?
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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SAP is super strict at least, it will just ignore you. Excel will let you fuck everything or help you in doing so.
Lol my company has a "no sort" policy. Many key docs just self destruct if you sort.
Can you not export to excel? Tbh Im new to it and it is so all encompassing I am basically lurking around outside
You can copy and paste values to another workbook and sort but it'll kill almost all the useful information. We've got these massive docs that reference numerous tabs and populate parent+children lines. It's an absolute mess and takes 6 months of training, I look at it as job security lol
Surely it would be cheaper to hire a dev for 6 months to put it into a proper database.
Oh god, my training has been trial and error
Only those with no experience in corporate finance will find this surprising.
Excel is a powerful tool. The only ones who ridicule it are idiots who don't understand anything.
It’s a powerful tool that you shouldn’t use as a book keeping tool and ledger for a company that manages $16B. And I’ve worked on a trading floor of a big energy company. Excel was only used within departments as a tool for the employees not as the entire companies financial administration.
Excel is a fantastic tool. It is however not a database.
Anything Turing-complete is a powerful tool, but the reason people are reacting negatively is because of how much of the wrong tool it is.
- Does an excel-based solution offer adequate runtime performance? No
- Does an excel-based solution offer adequate write concurrency? No
- Does an excel-based solution offer appropriate data durability guarantees? No
Basically the only saving grace of Excel-based solutions is that they are built in tools that finance workers comprehend, and that is quite simply not enough. To base systems at this scale on Excel is criminally negligent.
You can do almost everything with excel. Should you do almost everything with excel? Definitely not.
Is it powerful? Yes
Is it fast when dealing with large volume of data? No
Are the "powerful" features intuitive to new users? Also no.
Source: I use Excel, Python, SQL for job
To be fair I think Excel is faster to get a novice up to speed than teaching them to program
Source: Manage SQL database infrastructure for a living
Surely its not any harder than teaching them basic SQL.
I guess it depends on what you define as "basic SQL". Because most people are already used to working with desktop apps, and familiar with the office programs specifically.
You'd essentially have to teach them programming. Its like when people say "terminal is better than GUI" (it's me, I say that) but then you forget about all of the people who don't know the difference between a desktop and a modem
It wouldn't be hard to teach them a graphical representation of SQL, something like Access I guess. Teach them concepts like joins and where clauses, and give them software that abstracts that a bit.
Then add some Excel-like features on top. Everything would end up being SQL at the end of the day, and sysadmins could then tune things to keep them fast (e.g. replicate DBs so poorly optimized queries don't hurt the whole org, esp. if a dept only needs read access).
au contraire. We know the abuse Excel has to go through. And MS even added features to make abusing it easier.
abuse means incorrect use here. incorrect means, there are better tools for the job.
In fairness to the register they also ridicule moving to a dedicatdd ERP in the same article.
You're r absolutely right there is nothing wrong with Excel. Its powerful software and ultimately it cones down to human and organisational processes about whether its being used to its best or not. You can also have the most expensive top end dedicated ERP in the world and still be a total mess. Similarly business used to run on pen and paper and could be highly efficient.
Software is just a tool, and organisation go wrong when they think it alone is the solution to their problems.
Also I doubt Health NZ overspend has anything whatsoever to do with excel. Instead it'll be due to rising demand, and inflationary pressures on public finances. We have the exact problems here in the UK with the NHS just scaled up to a £182bn.
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It's just one of 6,000 apps that New Zealand thinks might be best tamed with ERP
How does erotic role play help tame Excel?
For a non-joke answer. ERP in this context means Enterprise Resource Planning. It basically allows you to do everything an enterprise requires with one software system instead of using several different ones.
And they all suck ass
It's because you're supposed to customize them, not use as-is. We've had a lot of happy customers. Some send us gifts! But for the first year or maybe even couple of years, you probably pay more to your partner for implementation, customizations and advice than to the ERP developer for licensing.
ERPs aren't for every company, different ERPs work best for different companies and different partners themselves have their own specializations. The one I work through (used to work for, but now I have my own company and just contract for them), does small to medium sized production companies. Think 5-200 employees usually. The ERP we work with is meant to cover every imaginable use case - which is why it doesn't have enough depth. We add a bunch of stuff that isn't there OOTB, sometimes remove things in default modules, etc.
But first you NEED an ERP partner to make the most of it. At ours the CEO is also the biggest salesman. He's not afraid to tell you if he doesn't think it's a good fit. A bad partner will still try to sell you and that's going to end up in disappointment for everyone.
It sounds like JDE. My company uses it, but they don't even use all of the built in features. They do a bunch of stuff manually that they could just do with the software they're paying for.
Odoo actually. You more or less can't use all the features, there's too many. That doesn't mean it's the best ERP, it just tries to be a true generalist, which means it needs lots of customizations usually.
Setting up an ERP can also be completely botched if the company's representatives don't fully grasp all the functions needed. What I've been going through as a customer of an ERP suite is that the "stars" of the software don't actually understand the other 50% of functions outside their department. That remaining 50% is distributed among 4 other departments, so representation wasn't exactly prioritized. Add in high turnover circa 2021 and the whole thing is logistical nightmare that finally at least has a goal in sight.
The other underlying issue is the existing forms usually lack what we need and have too much fluff. Once our ERP partner modifies it, the ERP developer drops all support for that form. We get zero help when it gets mystery glitches.
So yeah, I can get why some places say fuck it and stick with excel. Half the workforce knows excel well enough to write what they need. Take 10% of them to format and lock down spreadsheets so the other 50% of the workforce can just fill in boxes and pick drop downs. It just works.
All that to say, I both expect more form a Healthcare company but also am not surprised.
Yeah, the requirements should also be clear - or at least clear before any sort of implementation starts. Defining the requirements is a large part of what our consultants do and the more experienced ones know how to ask questions to get perspectives of people other than the "stars". Takes months usually to get things to where us developers can get started on anything. We've built some hella cool shit for some customers but then you look at the git history and realize that it took the customer over a YEAR to go live. They must've easily invested six figures getting this ERP just right for their needs. Automatic imports from other software they use, lots of customizations, including some brand new in-erp apps. They're loving it so far. But you don't get this without considering a bunch of people's needs.
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I would also like to know more.
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Just goes to show that a spreadsheet is a very powerful tool.🤣
You could run empires on the back of a spreadsheet.
You absolutely shouldn't, it's nearly the worst option you have available, but you could.
It's not the worst option available, it might not be the cleanest solution, but it does offer a level of flexibility if you have an in-depth understanding of key operational (or financial) business processes.
Shift+F9.. annnnd, the data is gone
Not if there is a BACKUP folder with daily copies of all your spreadsheets.
Sifting through the backups is so much fun when you're trying to find when a particular issue started.
Excel is indeed super powerful. I've seen firsthand what they power in multiple Fortune 500 companies, and usually for a lot of critical tasks. It doesn't surprise me in the least that this company was using it for finances.
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Honestly, that's fine. This may be a wild take, but they grew and their usage of excel obviously didn't hold them back, what's the issue?
The fact that excel lacks any sort of auditing or access controls. The fact that any corruption in the file could lead to the company not knowing what money goes where and who's been paid and who owes them money.
Excel or not, they should be using backups.
'Why do we need a backup when we have a RAID?"
The accounting head when you try to explain that your backup systems are woefully insufficient.
Excel isn't a problem unless all of it was done on one sheet and the only function used was sum()
Should have used three spreadsheets. Excel tends to run slowly when a spreadsheet has more than a million cells in it.
That depends on spending articles, not on sum amount. Maybe their accounting is as simple as: 10bn income, 2bn to steal, 3 for salaries, 1 for medicaments and machinery, rest for advertisements.
You don't need super-pooper software for that.
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Probably should get a dedicated ERP system, mainly to just have official support.
But anybody in finance (like me) knows that everybody from low level accounting assistants, to CBOs use excel daily, even if they have an ERP system. For instance, the one I am using is complete shit with outrageous inexcusable 'features' (can't even describe them because they sound made up). So we all just export data to excel so we can format the reports/data into an actual useful format.
Also in finance, hate excel, use python for everything, all my scripts still end with pd.to_excel() because I'm not the only person on the company.
Interesting, never thought about using python as an excel replacement. Definitely wouldn't work in my current work setting. But I just started taking a python class and I'll have to keep this in mind.
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